Sony Corp begins to restore PlayStation after security woes

Sony Corp said it had begun restoration of its PlayStation Network gaming service yesterday, almost a month after a massive security breach of the network forced the company to shut it down.

Gamers and security experts had criticized Sony for its handling of the incident, which sparked lawsuits and cast a shadow over its plans to combine the strengths of its content and hardware products via online services.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant apologized to customers for the outage and said a range of new security measures had been introduced. These included an early warning system that could alert the company to any attempt to penetrate the network.

“I can’t thank you enough for your patience and support during this time,” Sony’s No. 2, Kazuo Hirai, said in a news release, which was also posted as a video message on the PlayStation Network blog.

“We are taking aggressive action at all levels to address the concerns that were raised by this incident and are making consumer data protection a full-time, company wide commitment,” he said.

A single message from a PlayStation Network user under the name SG-1_F-302 on the blog read simply: “Thank you Sony!!!!”

However, some users have said the prolonged outage has prompted them to switch to rival Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live gaming service.

In what is thought to be the biggest security breach of its kind, hackers accessed personal information on 77 million PlayStation Network and Qriocity accounts, 90 percent of which are in North America and Europe, and may have stolen credit card information.

Hackers rented a server from Amazon.com Inc for the attack, Bloomberg news said earlier yesterday, citing a source with knowledge of the matter.

Sony discovered unusual activity on its PlayStation Network, which enables games console owners to download games, chat with friends and pit their skills against rivals, on April 19.

It shut down the network and its Qriocity online music and movie service, frustrating many users, but waited almost a week before alerting users to the extent of the security leak.

The company later found out that a separate online games service had also been penetrated, allowing access to another 25 million user accounts.

This story has been viewed 2326 times.

Comments will be moderated. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned.